Beggarman, Thief

by Irwin Shaw

  “When’re you going to the jail?” Teresa asked. “I don’t want you talking to him alone, filling his ear with poison.… I’m going with you.”

  “No, you’re not going anyplace with me,” Rudolph said. “I always make a point of visiting jails unaccompanied.”

  “But I don’t speak French,” she wailed. “I don’t even know where the jail is. How will I convince the cops I’m his mother?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to figure all that out yourself, Mrs. Kraler,” Rudolph said. “Now I don’t want to see either of you two people ever again. Tell your lawyer that the law firm he will have to get into contact with is Heath, Burrows and Gordon. The address is in Wall Street. I believe you were there once before, Mrs. Kraler.”

  “You bastard,” Teresa said, un-Mormon-like.

  Rudolph smiled. “Have a pleasant afternoon,” he said. He nodded and left the two plump, little angry people sitting silently on the bench in the shade of the pine trees. He was trembling with rage and frustration and despair for the poor boy in the jail in Grasse, but for the moment there was nothing he could do about it. It would take a rescue mission of enormous proportions to tear Wesley out of the grasp of his mother, and today he was not up to thinking even about the first step to be taken. Christian or not, when there was the scent of money in the air, Mrs. Teresa Kraler remembered the habits of her ancient profession. He dreaded having to tell Kate what was in store for her.

  He packed quickly. The concierge had gotten him a reservation at the Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence. A hotel in Grasse would have been closer to the jail he visited almost daily. Saint-Paul-de-Vence was closer to Jeanne. He had chosen Saint-Paul-de-Vence. There was no reason for his remaining any longer at the Hôtel du Cap and many reasons for leaving it. He had told the concierge to forward his mail, but under no circumstances to tell anyone where he was staying. He wrote to Jeanne, telling her where he was going to be, and sealed the note in an envelope addressed to her, care of Poste Restante, Nice.

  When he went down to the desk, to pay his bill while his bags were being put in his car, he was relieved to see that the Kralers had gone. He was shocked at the size of his bill. You pay a lot for agony, he thought, on the Côte d’Azur. It was one of the best hotels in the world, but he knew he would never come back to it again. And not because of the cost.

  He drove first to the port. Dwyer and Kate had to know where to find him. Dwyer was polishing one of the small brass bitts up forward when he came aboard. He stood up when he saw Rudolph and they shook hands.

  “How’re things?” Rudolph asked.

  Dwyer shrugged. “It ain’t no holiday,” he said. “They ain’t delivered the shaft and the propeller yet. They have to come from Italy and the Italians ain’t going to send it across the border until they get paid. I been on the phone to the insurance every day, but they’re in no hurry. They never are. They keep sending me new forms to fill out,” he said aggrievedly. “And they keep asking for Tom’s signature. Maybe the Italians don’t think anybody dies in France. And I have to keep getting everything translated. There’s a waitress in town who’s a friend of mine, she got the language, only she don’t know fuck-all about boats and she had to keep asking for the names of things like equipment, running lights, fathoms, flotsam, things like that. It’s driving me up the wall.”

  “All right, Bunny,” Rudolph said, suppressing a sigh. “Send all the papers to me. I’ll have them attended to.”

  “That’ll be a relief,” Dwyer said. “Thanks.”

  “I’m moving to the Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence,” Rudolph said. “You can reach me there.”

  “I don’t blame you, moving out of that hotel. It must have cost you a pile.”

  “It wasn’t cheap.”

  “You look around you,” Dwyer said, “all those big boats, all these expensive hotels, and you wonder where the money comes from. At least I do.”

  “Bunny,” Rudolph said, absurdly feeling on the defensive, “when I was young I was poorer than practically anyone you ever knew.”

  “Yeah. Tom told me. You worked like a dog. I got no beef against people who came up the way you did. I admire it. I would say you’re entitled to anything you can get.”

  “There’re a lot of things I can get,” Rudolph said, “that I’d gladly give away.”

  “I know what you mean,” Dwyer said.

  There was a short, uncomfortable silence between them.

  “I had hoped Kate would be here with you,” Rudolph said. “Something’s come up that she has to know about. How is she?”

  Dwyer looked at him consideringly, as though trying to decide whether or not he should tell him anything about Kate. “She’s gone,” he said. “She left for England this morning.”

  “You have her address?”

  “I do. Yeah,” Dwyer said carefully.

  “I need it,” Rudolph said. As quickly as possible, he told Dwyer about the Kralers’ visit, about the legal problems that Kate would have to deal with, or at least would have to be handled in Kate’s name.

  Dwyer nodded slowly. “Tom told me about that wife of his. A real ball-breaker, isn’t she?”

  “That’s the least of her virtues,” Rudolph said. He saw that Dwyer was hesitant about giving him Kate’s address. “Bunny,” he said, “I want to ask you something. Don’t you believe that I’m trying to do the best for Kate? And for Wesley? And for you, too, for that matter?”

  “Nobody has to worry about me,” Dwyer said. “About Kate—” He made his curious, almost feminine gesture with his hands, as if explaining the situation in words was beyond him. “I know she sounded … well … snappish the other day. It’s not that she’s sore at you or anything like that. I’d say, what it is—” Again the little gesture. “It’s that she’s—” He searched for the word. “She’s bruised. She’s a sensible woman; she’ll get over it. Especially now that she’s back home in England. You got a pencil and a piece of paper?”

  Rudolph took a notebook and pen out of his pocket. Bunny gave him the address and Rudolph wrote it down. “She doesn’t have a telephone,” Bunny said. “I gather her folks ain’t rolling in money.”

  “I’ll write her,” Rudolph said, “when anything develops.” He looked around him at the scrubbed deck, the polished rails and brasswork. “The ship looks fine,” he said.

  “There’s always something to be done,” Dwyer said. “I made a date to have it hauled up in the yard two weeks from today. The goddamn stuff ought to be here from Italy by then.”

  “Bunny,” Rudolph asked, “how much do you think the Clothilde is worth? What it would sell for?”

  “What it’s worth and what it would sell for are two different things,” Dwyer said. “If you figure what it cost originally and all the work and improvements Tom and me put into it and the new radar you gave him as a wedding present—that’ll have to be installed, too—I’d say it would come to almost a hundred thousand dollars. That’s what it’s worth. But if you have to sell it fast, like you said when you were telling us about settling the estate—and in this month, with the season more than half gone—nobody likes to pay for the upkeep of a boat for a whole winter—if people’re going to buy, they’re most likely to buy in the late spring—if you have to sell it fast in the off months and people know you have to sell, why then, naturally, they’ll try to cut your throat and maybe you’d be lucky if you got fifty thousand dollars for it. Anyway, I’m not the one to talk about this. You ought to go around, talk to some of the yacht brokers here and in Cannes, Saint-Tropez, you see what I mean, maybe they have somebody on their books’d be interested for a fair price.…”

  “Has anybody approached you so far?” Rudolph asked.

  Dwyer shook his head. “I really don’t think anybody who knows Antibes’d make a bid. After the murder and all. I think you’d do better to change the name and sail her to another harbor. Maybe another country. Italy, Spain, somewhere like that. Maybe even in Piraeus, that’s in Greece.… People’
re superstitious about ships.”

  “Bunny,” Rudolph said, “I don’t want you to get angry at what I’m going to say, but I have to talk to you about it. Somebody’s got to stay with the boat until it’s sold.…”

  “I would think so.”

  “And he’d have to be paid, wouldn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Dwyer said uncomfortably.

  “What would the usual salary be?”

  “That depends,” Dwyer said evasively, “how much work you expected him to do, if he was an engineer or not, things like that.”

  “You, for example. If you were on another ship?”

  “Well, if I’d been hired on earlier—I mean people’ve got their crews fixed by now—I guess about five hundred dollars a month.”

  “Good,” Rudolph said. “You’re going to get five hundred dollars a month.”

  “I didn’t ask for it,” Dwyer said harshly.

  “I know you didn’t. But you’re going to get it.”

  “Just remember I didn’t ask for it.” Dwyer put out his hand and Rudolph shook it. “I just wish,” Dwyer said, “there was some way of Tom knowing all you’re doing for me, for Kate and the kid, for the Clothilde.”

  Rudolph smiled. “I didn’t ask for it,” he said, “but I got it.”

  Dwyer chuckled. “I think there’s still some whiskey left on board,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t mind a drink,” Rudolph said.

  As they went aft, Dwyer said, “Your sister, Mrs. Burke—Gretchen—made me into a whiskey drinker. Did she tell you?”

  “No. She kept your romance secret.”

  He saw that Dwyer didn’t smile and said nothing more about Gretchen.

  They had the whiskey in the wheelhouse, warm. Dwyer apologized for not having any ice. He didn’t want to have the generator that supplied the electricity running, wasting fuel.

  “It’s a funny thing,” Dwyer said, relaxed now, with the glass in his hand. “You and Gretchen and Tom all in the same family.” He took a big gulp of his drink. “Fire and ice,” he said obscurely.

  Rudolph didn’t ask him to explain what he meant by that.

  As he left, Rudolph said, “If I don’t see you before then, I’ll see you at the airport when Wesley leaves. You remember the date?”

  “I have it written down,” Dwyer said. “I’ll pack his things for him and bring them along with me.” He hesitated, coughed a little. “He’s got a whole folder full of photos up forward. You know—pictures of the ship, ports we put into, him and his father, me and Kate.… That sort of thing. Should I pack them in?” He lifted his glass and closed his eyes as he drank, as though the matter were of no great importance.

  “Pack them in,” Rudolph said. Memory hurt, but it was necessary baggage.

  “I got a whole bunch of pictures from the wedding. All of us … you know—drinking toasts, dancing, stuff like that, all of us.…”

  “I think it would be a good idea to leave them out,” Rudolph said. Too much was too much.

  Dwyer nodded. “Kate didn’t want them either. And I don’t think I have room to keep them. I’ll be traveling finally, you know.…”

  “Send them to me,” Rudolph said. “I’ll keep them in a safe place. Maybe after a while Wesley would like to see them.” He remembered the pictures that Jean had taken that day. He would put the other ones with them.

  Dwyer nodded again. “Another drink?”

  “No, thanks,” Rudolph said. “I haven’t eaten lunch yet. Would you like to join me?”

  Dwyer shook his head. “Kind of you, Rudy,” he said, “but I already ate.” Dwyer had a quota, Rudolph saw. One favor accepted a day. No more.

  They put their glasses down, Dwyer carefully wiping away with a cloth the damp the glasses left.

  He was going forward to finish polishing the bitts as Rudolph left the Clothilde.

  After he had checked in at the new hotel Rudolph had lunch on the terrace overlooking the valley that looked as though it had been designed from a painting by Renoir. When he had finished lunch, he made a call to the old lawyer in Antibes. He explained that the Clothilde was for sale and that he would like the lawyer to act as agent for the estate in the transaction. “If the best offer you can get,” he said, “is not at least one hundred thousand dollars, let me know. I’ll buy it.”

  “That’s most gentlemanly of you,” the lawyer said, his voice thin over the faulty telephone wires.

  “It’s a simple business matter.”

  “I see,” the lawyer said. They both knew he was lying. No matter.

  After that Rudolph called Johnny Heath in New York and talked at length. “Oh, what a mess,” Heath said. “I’ll do my best. I await the letter from Mr. and Mrs. Kraler’s lawyer with impatience.”

  Then Rudolph put on his swimming trunks and did forty laps in the pool, his mind empty in the swish of water, his body used and healthily tired by the time he had finished.

  After the swim he sat drying off by the side of the pool, sipping at a cold beer.

  He felt guilty for feeling so well. He wondered, displeased with himself for the thought, how he would act if the telephone rang and the call was for him and a voice announced that the plane with his family aboard had gone down into the sea.

  Fire and ice, Dwyer had said.

  « »

  CHAPTER 8

  FROM BILLY ABBOTT’S NOTEBOOK—

  FAMILIES. THERE’S A SUBJECT.

  LOVE AND DESTROY. NOT NECESSARILY. BUT OFTEN ENOUGH TO SHOW UP WELL IN THE AVERAGES. FOR FREUD THE STAGE FOR GREEK TRAGEDY—INCEST, PATRICIDE, OTHER INTIMATE DELIGHTS. DREADFUL TO IMAGINE WHAT THE GOOD DOCTOR’S FAMILY LIFE IN VIENNA HAD BEEN LIKE.

  WAS JUNG MORE LENIENT? MUST ASK MONIKA, FOUNTAIN OF WISDOM. COME TO THINK OF IT, SHE NEVER TALKS ABOUT “HER” FAMILY. SKELETONS IN EVERY CLOSET.

  HAVE NEVER MET WESLEY JORDACHE. POOR LITTLE BASTARD. LOST IN THE SHUFFLE. WILL THE MURDER OF HIS FATHER TURN OUT TO BE AN ENLARGING EXPERIENCE FOR HIS SOUL? MY GRANDFATHER DIED WHEN RUDOLPH AND MY MOTHER WERE COMPARATIVELY YOUNG AND THEIR SOULS DO NOT SEEM NOTICEABLY ENLARGED.

  I LIKED MY GRANDMOTHER BECAUSE SHE DOTED ON ME. SHE DID NOT DOTE ON MY MOTHER AND EVEN ON THE DAY OF HER FUNERAL MY MOTHER HAD NO USE FOR HER. WILL MY MOTHER HAVE ANY USE FOR ME ON THE DAY OF “MY” FUNERAL? I HAVE A PREMONITION I WILL DIE YOUNG. MY MOTHER IS MADE OF STEEL, WILL LAST FOREVER, OUTWEARING MAN AFTER MAN.

  DOES HER SEXUALITY OFFEND ME? YES.

  DOES MY SEXUALITY, THAT OF MONIKA, OFFEND ME? NO. INJUSTICE IS THE COIN THAT IS EXCHANGED BETWEEN THE GENERATIONS.

  MY MOTHER IS A PROMISCUOUS WOMAN. MY FATHER, WHEN YOUNGER AND COULD MANAGE IT, WAS, BY HIS OWN ACCOUNTS, A PROMISCUOUS MAN. I AM NOT. LIKE THE DRUNKARD’S CHILD, I STAY AWAY FROM THE VICE I SEE IN THE PARENT.

  SONS REVOLT. DAUGHTERS RUN OFF. I DID NEITHER. I HID. THE ARMY HAS MADE IT EASIER. IT WOULD BE INTERESTING TO MEET WITH COUSIN WESLEY, SO FAR UNKNOWN TO ME, COMPARE NOTES, THE SAME BLOOD RUNNING IN OUR VEINS.

  THE FLOWER CHILDREN REARRANGED THE IDEA OF FAMILY. I COULD NOT LIVE IN A COMMUNE. UNHYGIENIC ENTANGLEMENTS. DESPERATE EXPERIMENTS, DOOMED TO FAILURE. WE ARE TOO FAR PAST THE TRIBE. I DO NOT WANT SOMEONE ELSE’S CHILD TO DISTURB ME WHILE I AM READING OR SHAVING OR TAKING MY WIFE TO BED.

  WILL I LIVE IN A SUBURB TEN YEARS FROM NOW AND PLAY BRIDGE AND WATCH FOOTBALL GAMES ON THE TELEVISION ALL WEEKEND LONG? COMMUTE? SWAP WIVES? VOTE FOR THAT YEAR’S NIXON?

  IT IS LATE. I MISS MONIKA.

  « »

  Wesley was sitting, cleanly shaved, neatly dressed in a suit that Rudolph had brought him from the Clothilde, waiting for the agent who was to take him to the airport. The suit had been bought for him by his father more than a year ago and was now very much too short in the arms and too tight across the chest. As he had expected, his Uncle Rudolph had somehow fixed it for him. Although having to leave France wasn’t such a great arrangement. He had never been happy in America—and he had been happy in France, at least until the day his father died.

  It hadn’t b
een so bad in the prison in Grasse. The cop he had hit in the bar was stationed in Cannes and hadn’t been around to bug him, and among the guards and with the juge d’instruction who had examined him he had enjoyed a certain celebrity because of what had happened to his father and because he spoke French and had knocked out the Englishman, who had had a moderate reputation as a barroom fighter with the local police. Also he had been polite and had caused nobody any trouble. The occasional bill his uncle had slipped to the guards and a call from the American consulate, which his uncle had prompted, hadn’t hurt, either.

  One good thing about Uncle Rudy, he never even hinted that Wesley ought to show some gratitude for what he’d done for him. Wesley would have liked to show gratitude but he didn’t know how. Eventually, he thought, he’d have to work on that. As it was, there was nothing much he could think of saying to his uncle, who seemed embarrassed to see Wesley behind bars, as though it was somehow his fault.

  One of the guards had even smuggled in a photograph from the police files of the man called Danovic his father had had the fight with in the Porte Rose. Wesley would remember the face when it was necessary to recognize it.

  He said nothing of this to anyone. He had never been an open boy-even with his father it had been difficult for him to talk about himself, although his father had told him almost everything he wanted to hear about his own life. Now, he kept what he was feeling to himself. He felt threatened, although he wasn’t certain what was threatening him. Whatever it was, silence was the first line of defense. He had learned that a long time ago, when his mother had put him in that damned military school.

  His mother was another ball game. She had screamed and cried and scolded and slobbered all over him and promised him he would lead a different life when she got him back with her new husband in Indianapolis. He didn’t want to lead a different life. He had asked his uncle if he had to go to Indianapolis and Rudolph had looked sad and said, “At least while you’re still a minor.” It had something to do with money, he didn’t understand just what. No matter. He could take a look at the scene and blow if he didn’t like it.